Saturday, September 17, 2005

[Saturday] Random Ten - "Everything's a Hearing Aid" Edition

Back by unpopular demand, The Electric Mayhem Random Ten, out of 367 tracks:

1. Seu Jorge - Starman
2. The Pixies - Where Is My Mind?
3. The Strokes - Last Night
4. The Smiths - How Soon Is Now
5. Sidecar - I Have Known Love
6. James Brown - It's A Man's World
7. NoMeansNo - Lullabye
8. Common - The Light
9. Nick Drake - One Of These Things First
10. Joan Jett - I Love Rock & Roll

I helped with my first Audiology lab on Thursday. The way the labs work is that the class of 42 students - 90% of whom are very pretty young ladies - gets split up into three groups of 15 or so, and the three labs run sequentially Thursday afternoons. I was a little nervous going into my first T.A.ing experience, so Bill decided that he'd run the first lab to give me a review and show me what he expected. Everything went well, I took a few notes, and then it was my turn to lead the second lab; my nervousness hadn't quite left me, though. At the beginning, I passed a box of earplugs around the class, which they were going to need for the empathy modeling lab over the weekend (which I did last year).

As I was passing them around, my brain must have gotten confused from all of my jitteriness, because I said "Now these hearing aids - earplugs, rather, the exact opposite of hearing aids." Everyone had a good laugh, and I figured the ice was broken. But I couldn't stop; I called the earplugs "hearing aids" three more times, and each time the class laughed louder and I got more flustered.

Finally, I
finished up that explanation, and started to explain the in-class part of the lab: using tuning fork hearing tests to demonstrate the two types of sound conduction and respective hearing loss. To demonstrate the first test I picked up a fork, hit it on my shoe, and said "You should hit the hearing aid on a soft surface - TUNING FORK! Not hearing aid, tuning fork!" Again, the class roared with laughter, and Bill leaned towards me, offered his pen, and said "Would you like to write this down with my hearing aid?"

The Doc's tip on making a class feel at ease: establish at the very beginning that you are an idiot.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I laughed. You rock!

Shannon said...

Funny! I wouldn't worry about it! I love it when teachers do those kinds of things- it makes them seem more human and less "expert." Besides, you can always just say you were checking to make sure they were really listening!